Typically, Sandwich of the Week posts come about a week after I eat the sandwich in question, after I’ve had some time to think about it and think about what I want to say about it. You presumably don’t care all that much how this content sausage is made, but I mention that here because this particular sandwich is an exception. This particular sandwich is exceptional. I ate it on a Monday night, and it moved me so much that I write about it now on Tuesday morning.

The sandwich

The Emmy Burger from Emily, a New York City restaurant with locations in the Clinton Hill neighborhood of Brooklyn and the West Village neighborhood in Manhattan. I went to the latter.

The construction

Two beef patties with American cheese, pickles, caramelized onions and “Emmy sauce” on a pretzel bun.

Important background information

This burger kept showing up on my Instagram feed, looking incredible, but I entered Emily a little nervous about my meal for a few reasons. For one thing, it was my birthday, and in that the occasion matters to me it is largely because I have a history of weirdly lousy luck on my birthday. I’m not especially superstitious and I recognize that my bad-day birthdays more likely reflect coincidence and confirmation bias more than any cosmic conspiracy to ruin my birthday on the regular. But since this birthday opened with Day 4 of an intensely boring jury-duty assignment, I went to dinner with some small sense of looming doom — with doom, in this case, meaning a disappointing cheeseburger.

Also, I have come to suspect some eateries of valuing social-media shareability over deliciousness in the construction of menu items, and the Emmy Burger so lends itself to amateur food photography that I felt certain it couldn’t possibly live up to how good it looked when that guy I used to work with posted it a few weeks ago.

Lastly, while I have never in my life cared about the quality of service at a restaurant nearly as much as I do the quality of the food, it turns out the equation changes a little when you’re bringing a tiny baby to dinner — as we did Monday. Strollers, I recognize, can be a huge pain for people working in a restaurant, and few Manhattan hotspots seem especially eager to waste precious space on a 4-month-old who’s not going to eat or drink anything but may very well create a disturbance for the rest of the diners. Having never been to this place before, I feared getting an obnoxious attitude from inconvenienced staffers. It does happen.

But I shouldn’t have judged: The people working at Emily were all awesome and welcoming and accommodating, even after we showed up late for the reservation. So that’s cool.

How it tastes

I went in skeptical, my friends, and I exited fanatical. This cheeseburger is somehow even better than it looks.

When you focus, you can distinguish the flavors of all the individual ingredients here, but they harmonize so well that it tastes less like two beef patties with cheese, onions and sauce on a pretzel bun than it does a glorious burger symphony. It’s definitely a cheeseburger, and it definitely tastes like a cheeseburger, but it doesn’t taste exactly like any cheeseburger I’ve had before.

The patties themselves are perfectly prepared, cooked through but still juicy and pink inside, offering enough beefy flavor to, again, make you fully aware you’re eating a burger even with all the others tastes in play. The cheese goops out from between them, adding creaminess and more flavor and binding the sandwich together. I don’t even like caramelized onions, normally, but here they exist as an important element of the broader burger, adding an earthy and familiar taste that keeps you grounded amid the ethereal flavor of the plentiful, deep-orange sauce.

There’s a lot going on in the sauce. It’s thinner than your typical mayo-driven burger condiment, but it does bring some of the sweet sort of creaminess associated with “special sauce” everywhere. Except on top of that, there’s a hint of peppery spice and a bite of vinegar, with a warm flavor I recognize from Korean food and can only really describe as “cozy.”

The burger’s salty, but not quite aggressively so, and the pretzel bun is airier than most of its cohort, thick enough to hold together under all the grease and sauce and cheese but not so thick as to make it too bready.

It’s all so good.

What it’s worth

$26, which, obviously, is not cheap. But it comes with fries and it’s fairly big. I split one with my wife so we could also share one of Emily’s Detroit-style pizzas. The pizza was also phenomenal. Detroit’s is a criminally underrated pizza style that’s only now beginning to get its due on the national stage.

Hall of Fame?

Yes, and probably an inner-circle Hall of Famer if it proves as good in subsequent sittings. This burger shot to somewhere near the very top of my mental list of best burgers in New York City, which has been exhaustively well-researched.

I found this on FTW and wanted to share:
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